Wideband data error rates

Data on the error and outage characteristics of the ground communications facility's wideband data circuits were gathered and analyzed. Examination of the curves and the data shows: (1) most error events contained only a single block in error. (78% have only a single block in error); (2) long strings of error blocks don't occur. (The longest error event was 28 blocks long); (3) consecutive missing blocks can be quite long. The longest in this set of tests was 9083 blocks, about 13.2 min; (4) the median length of the missing events is around 10 blocks; the typical outage is about 10 blocks long; and (5) an error correction scheme which could span a 1000 block error/outage period would probably correct more than 99% of the gaps.